Devblog 80 – A New Dawn news – CardLife

CardLife is about to get a big visual upgrade care of a new lighting system and day/night cycle. Take a look at the work of our Technical Artist Thor!

Posted by FJ_Gribb on Jul 6th, 2018

For this week’s DevBlog we have something very exciting to reveal – an all-new Day/Night cycle for CardLife!

Art Director Ric and Technical Artist / Resident Thunder God Thor have been working on a new lighting system for CardLife and today we can share with you the results. The aim of this new system was to give the game world more lighting depth, color and variation in order to improve the visuals without impacting performance. Plus we wanted to give anyone that wants to mod CardLife more control of the day/night cycle.

Now you might be thinking – ‘Lighting? That’s a tiny part of the game. Why aren’t you adding more content?! ‘ Don’t worry we are adding more content, that’s absolutely the priority for us, this new lighting system is something that the art team has managed to fit in between coming up with new creature concepts, weapons etc.

Lighting governs absolutely everything to do with how CardLife looks and feels; from the way light rebounds off your freshly crafted Tungsten sword to creating that feeling of dread when the sun goes down and more monsters come out.

What’s New?

In CardLife currently, we use Unity Dynamic Sky System to handle the day/night cycle and lighting transitions. We used this early on to get the basic day/night functionality in there, but we soon found it massively limited us adding many of the subtle lighting techniques that can add vibrancy to a game world.

Now let’s break down what is happening what we’re adding one-by-one, but first let’s take a look at a groovy gif of the new day/night cycle in action: